North Korea's capital coddles the elite

ANNA FIFIELD

Last updated 08:49, September 3 2014

Anna Fifield

The new apartment buildings on Changjon Street in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, home to the most elite residents of the city. The city looks “just like Dubai” in the words of one government-appointed minder.

As though Pyongyang did not already feel like a theme park, now the North Koreans have turned it into an actual theme park.

Already a showcase of Stalinist architecture, the capital and its monuments to communist ideology are perfectly arrayed along wide boulevards.

But now a new "folk park" compresses the highlights into walking distance, featuring all the sights of North Korea in miniature form.

Anna Fifield

At the Pyoongyang Folk Park, a smaller version of a monument to the Korean Workers' Party sits next to shrunken - i.e. lifesize - statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

There's a tiny Kim Il Sung Square, complete with miniature tanks and missile transporters; and bronze statues of Kim and his son Kim Jong Il, shrunk down to mere lifesize. (The real ones, in central Pyongyang, are a towering 19 feet).

On a sunny Sunday morning, however, few people were at the park. There was a solo tourist, a few organised groups of children in school uniforms, and a flock of mainly Japanese journalists who were shooed away from the small monuments when they got too close while taking pictures.

A recent visitor, in the capital for the first time since 2008, came away with the impression that Pyongyang is becoming even more like a Potemkin village.

Anna Fifield

Construction abounds in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, which is becoming increasingly modern while the rest of the country flails.

Many more cars are on the streets — and not just the locally produced "Pyonghwa" brand or Chinese BYDs, but Lexus sport-utility vehicles and late-model BMWs and Audis — and many women are dressing more fashionably. Brightly colored, shiny high heels, often with jewels, appear to be the trend du jour.

Changjon Street, in the heart of the square, is unrecognisable from a few years ago.

Rows of round apartment towers line the street. Lit up at night, they are festooned with neon bands, giving them the appearance of giant fireworks. By day, the towers are reflected in the glittering river, making the city look "just like Dubai," in the words of one government-appointed minder.

Anna Fifield

There is now more traffic on the streets of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, but that’s not to say it’s gridlocked.

This is not a city on the ropes. But it also is not a city that is representative of the state of North Korea.

The situation in the cities outside the capital, and even more so in the countryside, remains extremely dire. The state does not provide anything like the kinds of rations it once did, and hunger remains widespread.

Even in Pyongyang, there are still many more signs of extreme poverty than wealth. Bent-over elderly women carry huge sacks on their backs, men with weathered faces sit on their haunches by the roadside, and North Korean children appear smaller than their Southern peers.

Foreign visitors to Pyongyang are driven along the same routes from their hotels, no matter where they are going, leading them to conclude that only certain streets are fit for foreign consumption.

The Pyongyang Folk park, which opened two years ago, is one of the many developments in the city that marks the centenary of Kim Il Sung's birth (he was born on April 15, 1912 — the same day the Titanic sank). The park features the sacred mountain of Paekdusan in the north, the dams of the West Sea and the ancient city of Kaesong near the southern border.

"Our great leader Comrade Kim Jong Un gave instructions to build this park for our people to teach them about our history from ancient to modern," said Kim Hyung, a state-appointed tour guide who was selling maps of the park. "We are very proud of our North Korean nation."

Construction still abounds today. Pyongyang airport is getting a new terminal — although foreign residents here say it's taking a long time — and new riverside parks feature basketball courts and picnic areas.

A drive around Pyongyang passes building sites filled with mounds of dirt, dump trucks and cranes, where men in olive green uniforms and yellow hard hats scurry around with spades.

Visitors staying at a hotel near the Daedong river go to sleep and wake up to the sound of boats dredging up sand to be made into cement.

Then there are the facilities for the elite that have been added to revolutionary monuments of the standard visitor's tour.

There's the Munsu water park in Pyongyang — a huge indoor space with water slides — where the North Korean patrons all seemed to be in large groups and many were wearing what appeared to be standard-issue swimsuits. Meanwhile, the shop, selling Nike shoes and SpongeBob water guns, was empty.

At a fancy new equestrian center on the outskirts of the capital, with its faux log cabin buildings and manicured tracks, the "horse trainers" were all 20-something men with crew cuts, looking as though they had come straight from their barracks. There was not a "customer" — or, for that matter, any horse poop — in sight.

It's part of what Evans Revere, a former US diplomat with a long career spent dealing with North Korea, calls the "bread and circuses" approach.

"The theme parks, amusement parks, water parks, equestrian parks — these are all directed at the elite while people in the rest of North Korea are not doing well at all," Revere said.

"The regime is making every effort to present an image of economic success."

To be sure, the vast majority of what outsiders see is staged.

The United Nations World Food Program, which feeds about 10 percent of the North Korean population, said in its latest monitoring report that 39 percent of the people it surveyed did not consume any kind of protein in the week before the agency visited.

Meanwhile, political repression remains as fierce as ever, with the state using fear of labor camps — or worse — to keep people from agitating for change.

But there is nevertheless a noticeable improvement in the living conditions of the elite — Pyongyang is home to the 10 percent of the population considered most loyal to the Kim family.

This raises many questions, including:

Where is the money coming from? The North Korean regime has long diverted its resources to its pet projects — away, say, from food to its nuclear program — but its recent missile tests suggest that it is not cutting corners with the military.

And will this contribute to social unrest? Although information is strictly controlled in North Korea, the country is more open than it was even a few years ago. Cellphones are now in use — maybe not widely, but in use all the same — and some people are allowed to travel.

It will be hard to keep up the charade of communist egalitarianism when the elites in Pyongyang are clearly living so much better than everyone else.

But then again, the people who have political power — the party cadres who live in the fancy new apartment towers — will be happier and even less likely to rock the boat.